devilears

@devilears

Posts made by devilears

I just hover my mouse cursor over the tab with the audio and I click. There is suddenly a mute button that mutes the tab.

On Chrome, the offending tabs always display the mute button. So I can see them and I don't click on them. Also, I can disable them, so even if I do click on them, they relay information, but they don't interfere with the media on the tab.

The sides are switched, on Chrome they are on the right hand side. On Opera, they appear on the left hand side of the tab. Not that this matters, but I'm just assuming someone went through a lot of trouble to make things on Opera different than what they already get with the Chrome engine.

I just saw now that I can install older versions of Opera from the FTP site. I would prefer using the latest and greatest versions, but if that is what it takes, I recall that there was an Opera version without the featuritis that just did its job. Even the developer versions were working. I'll see what that version was and then just disable updates so I can disable this mute button.

I prevent media from autostarting, so I have no need for a mute button.

That solves a different problem, though. My use case is there is already media playing on a tab. I often put a Youtube video on or a podcast or something to listen to the audio while I do something else. Then, when I switch back to the tab with media playing on it by clicking on it, the audio gets muted with a magic mute button that appears out of nowhere.

There used to be a way to disable this magic mute button. Chrome still has this option, which is why I'm currently using Chrome as my main browser. I have to dig in the flags section and disable the enable-tab-audio-muting flag, but it does work to keep my audio going.

This exact flag setting used to be available in Opera, and I would just like the option back.

I'm still struggling to understand why it is desirable to have a mute button on a tab.

If you have for example a video playing on Facebook and Youtube on separate tabs, it makes sense to notify the user of the tabs that have audio playing. If they ant to stop that audio, they can right click and mute the tab.

My request is merely to keep everyone happy: Do you want to use the mute button? Fine. Use it. Do you struggle to make sense of a mute button? Then just disable it, which is something that is allowed by the underlying chrome engine.

So besides bringing this to the attention in as far as I am aware is the proper way to do it, what else can I do to request that user configuration settings that were once there and working return to Opera again?

Perhaps you have missed the use case I sketched out above, which I specifically bothered with to conform to the requirements listed elsewhere on the forum as to how new features should be brought to the attention of Opera developers.

I agree that a company cant' simply add everything its users ask, but it is worth noting that users who come to Opera have a wide range of other options. What sets Opera apart from the other options? To me, it is not different features. I specifically switched to Opera from Firefox because Firefox also took away configuration settings, which I was using at the time.

Again, someone developed the options away. There was an option to remove the mute tab button. Perhaps it was not intended, but it worked, and it stopped working at some point in a developer version. I was enjoying the developer previews, despite them not always being ready for release. I imagine that the purpose of the developer previews is to make your lives easier, since users can bring things to your attention before you roll out featuritis in official releases.

I maintain that users should have options and there's no conceivable reason why someone would develop away a configuration setting.

This issue was first identified in the developer preview of Opera. I made Opera aware of it then, and noted that it isn't present in the official release. I asked nicely, please don't break your browser further and don't let this slip into the official stream.

Note that this is an issue to your users. You wax lyrical over whether it is a bug or not at your own peril.

It doesn't matter. The issue is 100% reproducible, I have made my case for why this should be an option that gives user control over the behaviour of their own browsers.

Now you want to get petty over what is a bug, and what is not. Please stick to the topic, namely a feature/bug that users want resolved, and let's not get philosophical about your understanding of what constitutes a bug.

Software not behaving according to user expectation is a bug. You may disagree about that, but you are still stuck with a browser that isn't behaving according to user expectation.